Beyond Digital Transformation, what are the gaps that might hinder this?
Digital transformation (DX) is the adoption of digital technology by a company. Common goals for its implementation are to improve efficiency, value or innovation. — Wikipedia
It has been widely reported around the world that COVID-19 accelerate the pace of digital transformation and adaptation of digital technology of various kinds within organisations. A recent survey by McKinsey found that COVID-19 pushes companies over their technology topping point and changes how business works and behave forever.
Since COVID-19, commercial companies and governments have made many reports and initiatives worldwide to embark on digitisation, digitalisation, and digital transformation. However, while the pace of DX has been hastened and smoothed, there are still various pockets of friction that could hinder organisation growth in the longer term. In this article, I want to highlight some of the frictional points I am seeing based on my consultation work with companies seeking DX.
Human Factors
Transform all you want, but eventually, people are the ones running the companies. Therefore, it is vital to get buy-ins from the people within the companies, especially those directly impacted by this change. For example, while we were performing rapid digitisation due to COVID-19 two years ago, most people were shocked and clueless. But when things get settled down, and people have the time now to think and react, things might change.
People might feel threatened by the technologies, especially when the selling point initially was to replace the people’s jobs. But, in reality, technologies should complement what people are doing and, in doing so, might lead to the creation of new jobs. So, when misunderstandings occur, people might decide to sabotage the use of technologies and determine that this might not be effective or efficient for businesses. DX is not a one-time project where one implement something and expect it to work perfectly, especially when people are involved.
When embarking on the DX, the key is not to get fixated on any technologies. Instead, it is critical to spend time to frame the problem with the people. Go through an interview, brainstorming, observations, etc., to gain clarity and ask, “Why?”. If we don’t uncover the real issue, we will spend more time later on corrective actions.
Company ABC engages our services to consult them on DX for their logistics department. During our initial meeting, we ask the facility manager to share with us his processes. Instead, he is fixated on a specific technology, as he deemed that to be his KPI. However, when we walked around his facility, we noticed numerous opportunities for improvement without DX. Therefore, they can get an immediate small win from this process.
Work on rapid prototyping and give the people an opportunity to touch and feel the recommended solution that aid their job. This process helps connect their thoughts with their tacit experience to articulate their needs better. Based on these findings, we can get closer to the solution that meets their requirement. This process also helps to gain buy-in from them when their opinion counts, and they contribute to the outcome, cultivating ownership.
Process Optimisations
Imagine that you have a work process that you can optimise to save 20% of your time daily. However, management immediately jumped onto DX instead of streamlining the process to save time. They believed that this would help them save time to reduce the laborious processes and get things done fast. While this can be true, the management can do it more effectively.
What might happen if DX took place on top of a process that’s not yet optimised? For example, the company might spend time adding resources (time and money) to digitise a process that can be eliminated right from the start. Then, when the organisation looks back at the DX experience and measure it against the effectiveness, they might not get the best outcome from this DX journey. While DX can benefit them, such incidents might prevent the organisation from embarking on further DX and deciding to stay status quo.
It is much cheaper and faster to get a COTS solution to implement the standard product in the company. However, in doing so, the company might need to change their processes, at times proven methods, to use the COTS solution. This might have a detrimental effect on the company’s long term productivity, while it might seem to be helping them to get more efficient.
In another spectrum, some companies seek to engage a consultant or commission an internal project team to look into the entire DX. Yes, this will take more time and cost more. However, in doing so, the team can look into the long term strategy of the organisation and align the technology needs to meet the future demand. Before technology implementation, the team might innovate the current process to explore possibilities for more efficient and effective ways of doing things.
Auditing
Me: What are you thinking of achieving when you want to print out those reports and file them when you can generate them immediately when you need them?
Customer: Well, I need to present to the auditors to justify the process improvement we made during auditing. They need to see what are the previous process and what are the changes in the new revision.
I know companies that embarked on a digital way of administrative submission, yet they need to provide physical evidence for audit purposes. Do you feel that this form of DX is more expensive than keeping things unchanged? After spending time and money to embark on the DX journey, people need to spend time to perform the double job. So while the outcome aims to save paper, they are now using more resources to do the same work.
While organisations worldwide are pushing beyond the tipping point for DX, achieving great mileage over the last two years, an anchor is weighing us down. Imagine that when companies can move ahead to be more sustainable, enabling flexible work arrangements and occupying lesser space, we need to reserve space for storage to comply with the traditional way of auditing.
This is not an easy question I encountered recently and got me thinking. But maybe there’s already something being done to align to our digital future. Unfortunately, I might have yet to come across such an arrangement.
DX is a marathon, not a sprint.
While DX is painted as a “silver bullet” that can act as “super glue” that binds everything and anything, it crumbles when the gaps are left unattended. It is not a simple process promised by many, and it is not something that can embark on by an individual. It is best to have a team that provides different perspectives from diverse expertise to help an organisation harvest the best of its DX journey.
The organisation needs to view this as a marathon that takes time to train, prepare, and condition before getting on the race. Gaps can be hard to spot by unconditioned eyes, and those who got so used to the gap might skip them entirely. In a sprint, everything happens too fast, too furious for one to appreciate and build rapport. Whereas in a marathon, we have a much longer distance to cover with more time to uncover those that could hinder the customer’s DX experience.
Thus, I hope this article helps you look beyond what you might see DX is all about and harvest the full benefit of this transformation.
